The Everyday in Contemporary Art Practices: Towards a Speculative Poetic Regime. The Case of Nicolás Lamas

The aim of this article is to demonstrate —in regard to works made from everyday objects— the incipient materialist shift in contemporary art compared to the previous textual shift, and to put forward some recent conclusions about the encounter between “the everyday”, materialism/speculative realism (Quentin Meillassoux; Levi Bryant; Graham Harman) and art practice, which will be approached specifically through the works of Nicolás Lamas: Boundary (2013), Ball (2013), Line (2013), What does a fish know about the water in which he swims all his life? (2014) and Geometritation of the world (2013). Regarding the study of “the everyday” in the world of art, we have witnessed the promotion of art centred on the immaterial elements of the relationship between the subject and immediate reality. However, we have recently seen a shift in theoretical and artistic output determined by the encounter between art and theories linked to materialism or speculative realism, which conditions the interpretation of everyday “things” and fosters a redefinition, in an experimental sense, of such object art practices. We are witnessing a paradigm shift regarding the presence of elements of “the everyday” in contemporary art: from the textual and linguistic framework that interprets practices with everyday objects by resorting to semiology and semiotics, to the speculative poetic framework that contemplates the everyday in works of art based on new concepts of materiality established by the theories of materialism/speculative realism and, in general, of new materialism. Everyday material elements in works that fall within the second paradigm are not used as functional signs with a transcendent referent, that is, as metaphors, but are instead the object of speculation and experimentation that endeavours to delve into their physical identity. The works composed of everyday objects by the Peruvian artist Nicolás Lamas could be considered material speculations of reality based on artistic manipulation and the installation of everyday elements in a continuous dialogue with space and other objects immersed in it.